Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli Volume I Part 8

'The best criticism on those sermons which proclaim so loudly the dignity of human nature was from our friend E.S. She said, coming out from Dr. Channing's church, that she felt fatigued by the demands the sermon made on her, and would go home and read what Jesus said,--"_Ye are of more value than many sparrows." That_ she could bear; it did not seem exaggerated praise.'

'The Swedenborgians say, "that is _Correspondence_," and the phrenologists, "that it is _Approbativeness,_" and so think they know all about it. It would not be so, if we could be like the birds,--make one method, and then desert it, and make a new one,--as they build their nests.'

'As regards crime, we cannot understand what we have not _already_ felt;--thus, all crimes have formed part of our minds. We do but recognize one part of ourselves in the worst actions of others. When you take the subject in this light, do you not incline to consider the capacity for action as something widely differing from the experience of a feeling?'

'How beautiful the life of Benvenuto Cellini! How his occupations perpetually impelled to thought,--to gushings of thought naturally excited!'

'Father lectured me for looking satirical when the man of Words spake, and so attentive to the man of Truth,--that is, of G.o.d.'

Margaret used often to talk about the books which she and I were reading.

G.o.dWIN. 'I think you will be more and more satisfied with G.o.dwin. He has fully lived the double existence of man, and he casts the reflexes on his magic mirror from a height where no object in life's panorama can cause one throb of delirious hope or grasping ambition. At any rate, if you study him, you may know all he has to tell. He is quite free from vanity, and conceals not miserly any of his treasures from the knowledge of posterity.

M'LLE. D'ESPINa.s.sE. 'I am swallowing by gasps that _cauldrony_ beverage of selfish pa.s.sion and morbid taste, the letters of M'lle D'Espina.s.se. It is good for me. How odious is the abandonment of pa.s.sion, such as this, unshaded by pride or delicacy, unhallowed by religion,--a selfish craving only; every source of enjoyment stifled to cherish this burning thirst. Yet the picture, so minute in its touches, is true as death. I should not like Delphine now.'

Events in life, apparently trivial, often seemed to her full of mystic significance, and it was her pleasure to turn such to poetry. On one occasion, the sight of a pa.s.sion-flower, given by one lady to another, and then lost, appeared to her so significant of the character, relation, and destiny of the two, that it drew from her lines of which two or three seem worth preserving, as indicating her feeling of social relations.

'Dear friend, my heart grew pensive when I saw The flower, for thee so sweetly set apart, By one whose pa.s.sionless though tender heart Is worthy to bestow, as angels are, By an unheeding hand conveyed away, To close, in unsoothed night, the promise of its day.

'The mystic flower read in thy soul-filled eye To its life's question the desired reply, But came no nearer. On thy gentle breast It hoped to find the haven of its rest; But in cold night, hurried afar from thee, It closed its once half-smiling destiny.

'Yet thus, methinks, it utters as it dies,-- "By the pure truth of those calm, gentle eyes Which saw my life should find its aim in thine, I see a clime where no strait laws confine.

In that blest land where _twos_ ne'er know a _three_, Save as the accord of their fine sympathy, O, best-loved, I will wait for thee!"'

III.

STUDIES.

"Nur durch das Morgenthor des Schonen Drangst du in der Erkenntniss Land; An hohen Glanz sich zu gewohnen Uebt sich, am Reize der Verstand.

Was bei dem Saitenklang der Musen Mit sussem Beben dich, durchdrang, Erzog die Kraft in deinem Busen, Die sich dereinst zum Weltgeist schw.a.n.g."

SCHILLER.

"To work, with heart resigned and spirit strong; Subdue, with patient toil, life's bitter wrong, Through Nature's dullest, as her brightest ways, We will march onward, singing to thy praise."

E.S., _in the Dial_.

"The peculiar nature of the scholar's occupation consists in this,--that science, and especially that side of it from which he conceives of the whole, shall continually burst forth before him in new and fairer forms. Let this fresh spiritual youth never grow old within him; let no form become fixed and rigid; let each sunrise bring him new joy and love in his vocation, and larger views of its significance."

FICHTE.

Of Margaret's studies while at Cambridge, I knew personally only of the German. She already, when I first became acquainted with her, had become familiar with the masterpieces of French, Italian and Spanish literature. But all this amount of reading had not made her "deep-learned in books and shallow in herself;" for she brought to the study of most writers "a spirit and genius equal or superior."--so far, at least, as the a.n.a.lytic understanding was concerned. Every writer whom she studied, as every person whom she knew, she placed in his own cla.s.s, knew his relation to other writers, to the world, to life, to nature, to herself. Much as they might delight her, they never swept her away. She breasted the current of their genius, as a stately swan moves up a stream, enjoying the rushing water the more because she resists it. In a pa.s.sionate love-struggle she wrestled thus with the genius of De Stael, of Rousseau, of Alfieri, of Petrarch.

The first and most striking element in the genius of Margaret was the clear, sharp understanding, which keenly distinguished between things different, and kept every thought, opinion, person, character, in its own place, not to be confounded with any other. The G.o.d Terminus presided over her intellect. She knew her thoughts as we know each other's faces; and opinions, with most of us so vague, shadowy, and shifting, were in her mind substantial and distinct realities. Some persons see distinctions, others resemblances; but she saw both. No sophist could pa.s.s on her a counterfeit piece of intellectual money; but also she recognized the one pure metallic basis in coins of different epochs, and when mixed with a very ruinous alloy. This gave a comprehensive quality to her mind most imposing and convincing, as it enabled her to show the one Truth, or the one Law, manifesting itself in such various phenomena. Add to this her profound faith in truth, which made her a Realist of that order that thoughts to her were things. The world of her thoughts rose around her mind as a panorama,--the sun-in the sky, the flowers distinct in the foreground, the pale mountain sharply, though faintly, cutting the sky with its outline in the distance,--and all in pure light and shade, all in perfect perspective.

Margaret began to study German early in 1832. Both she and I were attracted towards this literature, at the same time, by the wild bugle-call of Thomas Carlyle, in his romantic articles on Richter, Schiller, and Goethe, which appeared in the old Foreign Review, the Edinburgh Review, and afterwards in the Foreign Quarterly.

I believe that in about three months from the time that Margaret commenced German, she was reading with ease the masterpieces of its literature. Within the year, she had read Goethe's Faust, Ta.s.so, Iphigenia, Hermann and Dorothea, Elective Affinities, and Memoirs; Tieck's William Lovel, Prince Zerbino, and other works; Korner, Novalis, and something of Richter; all of Schiller's princ.i.p.al dramas, and his lyric poetry. Almost every evening I saw her, and heard an account of her studies. Her mind opened under this influence, as the apple-blossom at the end of a warm week in May. The thought and the beauty of this rich literature equally filled her mind and fascinated her imagination.

But if she studied books thus earnestly, still more frequently did she turn to the study of men. Authors and their personages were not ideal beings merely, but full of human blood and life. So living men and women were idealized again, and transfigured by her rapid fancy,--every trait intensified, developed, enn.o.bled. Lessing says that "The true portrait painter will paint his subject, flattering him as art ought to flatter,--painting the face not as it actually is, but as creation designed, omitting the imperfections arising from the resistance of the material worked in." Margaret's portrait-painting intellect treated persons in this way. She saw them as G.o.d designed them,--omitting the loss from wear and tear, from false position, from friction of untoward circ.u.mstances. If we may be permitted to take a somewhat transcendental distinction, she saw them not as they _actually_ were, but as they _really_ were. This accounts for her high estimate of her friends,--too high, too flattering, indeed, but justified to her mind by her knowledge of their interior capabilities.

The following extract ill.u.s.trates her power, even at the age of nineteen, of comprehending the relations of two things lying far apart from each other, and of rising to a point of view which could overlook both:--

'I have had,--while staying a day or two in Boston,--some of Shirley's, Ford's, and Hey wood's plays from the Athenaeum.

There are some n.o.ble strains of proud rage, and intellectual, but most poetical, all-absorbing, pa.s.sion. One of the finest fictions I recollect in those specimens of the Italian novelists,--which you, I think, read when I did,--n.o.ble, where it ill.u.s.trated the Italian national spirit, is ruined by the English novelist, who has transplanted it to an uncongenial soil; yet he has given it beauties which an Italian eye could not see, by investing the actors with deep, continuing, truly English affections.'

The following criticism on some of the dialogues of Plato, (dated June 3d, 1833,) in a letter returning the book, ill.u.s.trates her downright way of asking world-revered authors to accept the test of plain common sense. As a finished or deliberate opinion, it ought not to be read; for it was not intended as such, but as a first impression hastily sketched. But read it as an ill.u.s.tration of the method in which her mind worked, and you will see that she meets the great Plato modestly, but boldly, on human ground, asking him for satisfactory proof of all that he says, and treating him as a human being, speaking to human beings.

'_June_ 3, 1833.--I part with Plato with regret. I could have wished to "enchant myself," as Socrates would say, with him some days longer. Eutyphron is excellent. Tis the best specimen I have ever seen of that mode of convincing. There is one pa.s.sage in which Socrates, as if it were _aside_,--since the remark is quite away from the consciousness of Eutyphron,--declares, "qu'il aimerait incomparablement mieux des principes fixes et inebranlables a l'habilite de Dedale avec les tresors de Tantale." I delight to hear such things from those whose lives have given the right to say them. For 'tis not always true what Lessing says, and I, myself, once thought,--

"F.--Von was fur Tugenden spricht er denn?

MINNA.----Er spricht von keiner; denn ihn fehlt keine."

For the mouth sometimes talketh virtue from the overflowing of the heart, as well as love, anger, &c.

'"Crito" I have read only once, but like it. I have not got it in my heart though, so clearly as the others. The "Apology"

I deem only remarkable for the n.o.ble tone of sentiment, and beautiful calmness. I was much affected by Phaedo, but think the argument weak in many respects. The nature of abstract ideas is clearly set forth; but there is no justice in reasoning, from their existence, that our souls have lived previous to our present state, since it was as easy for the Deity to create at once the idea of beauty within us, as the sense which brings to the soul intelligence that it exists in some outward shape. He does not clearly show his opinion of what the soul is; whether eternal _as_ the Deity, created _by_ the Deity, or how. In his answer to Simmias, he takes advantage of the general meaning of the words harmony, discord, &c. The soul might be a result, without being a harmony. But I think too many things to write, and some I have not had time to examine. Meanwhile I can think over parts, and say to myself, "beautiful," "n.o.ble," and use this as one of my enchantments.'

'I send two of your German books. It pains me to part with Ottilia. I wish we could learn books, as we do pieces of music, and repeat them, in the author's order, when taking a solitary walk. But, now, if I set out with an Ottilia, this wicked fairy a.s.sociation conjures up such crowds of less lovely companions, that I often cease to feel the influence of the elect one. I don't like Goethe so well as Schiller now.

I mean, I am not so happy in reading him. That perfect wisdom and _merciless_ nature seems cold, after those seducing pictures of forms more beautiful than truth. Nathless, I should like to read the second part of Goethe's Memoirs, if you do not use it now.'